KILLERS

KILLERS, a film released without a press screening, takes one’s breath away with the depth, breadth, and sheer scope of its ineptitude. Director Robert Luketic has confused helming a frothy action romp through silliness with remaking Ingmar Bergman’s SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE. Star Katherine Heigl may be many things, Liv Ullman is not one of them. Co-star Ashton Kutcher, forced to rely on his innate and not inconsiderable boyish charm, bobbles uneasily between the slick C.I.A. agent with which his character begins the film, and the harassed suburban homebody to which his character aspires for the remainder of it, difficult father-in-law notwithstanding.

Things hit the skids from the start with a freshly dumped Jen (Heigl) vacationing in Nice with her parents (Tom Selleck and Catherine O’Hara). They are both one-note characters, he an airline pilot with fussy rules about safety, she a lush. Jen, popping a handful of stomach soothers in the hotel’s elevator, runs into Spencer on his way to the beach. He’s showing off his abs, she’s behaving like a particularly gawky 10-year-old, and not in a charming way. Naturally they hook up despite a first date that is not only awkward, it‘s painfully dull, even when Spencer cuts Jen out of her too-tight dress. Naturally Spencer is disillusioned with his life of adventure and killing. Naturally he’s taken with something about Jen of which the audience is completely unaware. Three years later, they are ensconced in affluent suburbia when, further naturally, Spencer’s old life comes back to haunt him in the form of a $20 million bounty on his head.

It’s not as though the concept in KILLERS is unpromising, average suburban wife thrown into a life-and-death race against people out to murder her hubby. Consider the potential pratfalls, slapstick, zingers, and the juxtaposition of the living death of suburbia and the vibrant feeling of living on the edge. Yet, rendered as it is, as though everyone involved were attempting to maintain a stasis of a particularly low energy, and a script that can’t quite decide what it wants to be while serving up clichés to kill time, there is simply nothing to keep the flick going, or the audience engaged. There is more spark to the way O’Hara pours vodka into a pitcher of tomato juice than in the car chase, fiery explosion, and semi-automatic gun play combined. Lampoons of suburbia are stale, the performances are erratic at best, with Heigl attempting to combine farce and melodrama in ways that make one long for that stomach soother her character was popping at the beginning of the film. Or, better, that cocktail O’Hara was pouring with such relish. There is not a moment of this flick worth seeing, much less remembering.